[landmass]

I agree with the concept of starting small - I didn't. I have various accounts in various banks and now have 26 accounts that need to be balanced, all in order to have live "net worth" visibility. At first I enjoyed doing it to that level, but not anymore. I need to prune the accounts I enter using .csv and just keep track of current accounts, like checking accounts.

That said, GnuCash is definitely worth the effort - GnuCash has continued while some "easier" financial programs have not. I thought about using it after MicroSoft abandoned MS Money with 10 years of my financial data. I looked at GnuCash but it looked too hard and I migrated to MyMoney instead, but after a few years it dropped support. I again looked at GnuCash but again chose not to face learning the "harder" GnuCash and migrated to MoneyDance; after a few years they changed its default to "Save on exit," rather than allowing me to exit to abandon mistakes and start over. This time I migrated to GnuCash in the hope that it will be longer-lived.

I don't know that I need to have all my financial data for 25 years, but if I'd chosen GnuCash from the start I'd still have it. It turns out that the other systems were not easier, if you include having to re-learn so many financial systems and incompletely migrate existing data.